A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

Total Pageviews

Archive of Wolff Materials

Thursday, July 24, 2014

POLLS

Back in the early nineties, when I was living in Western
Massachusetts, Gallup or someone did one of those “name recognition” polls that
seem to pop up all the time.As you
might expect, in Massachusetts Teddy Kennedy scored off the charts.By then, he had been a senator for thirty
year or so and was Mr. Massachusetts.His name recognition score was 95%, way
higher than that of any other Massachusetts politician.But I remember saying to myself, “My God,
does that mean that when I am walking in Boston, every twentieth person or so I
pass on the street has never heard
of Teddy Kennedy?What rock have they
been living under?”

Google tells me that roughly 9% of Americans over the age of
12 use illegal drugs.That means that
when I am driving down the highway at 75 mph, passing cars coming in the other
direction at 75 mph, so that we are passing each other at 150 miles per hour,
roughly one in eleven of those people rushing by me uses illegal mind-altering
drugs!If I think too much about that, I
just want to go back home, crawl into bed, and eat take-out.

Statistics are like that.We look at the numbers and forget that each percentage point represents
a lot of real people.This thought
crossed my mind yet again yesterday when I came upon a report of a series of Gallup
polls about the religious beliefs of Americans.You can read the details here.The question that caught my eye was the one about how you think the
Bible should be understood.As of last
May, 28% of respondents said the Bible was the actual word of God and should be
taken literally, word for word.[This is
down 10 percent from forty years ago.]Now, the population of the United States is estimated to be about 320
million, so if Gallup is to be believed, there are maybe one hundred million people[RW1]
living in this country [not counting little babies who can’t be held
responsible quite yet for the nuttiness of their parents] who believe that the
Bible should be taken as literally true, word for word.[We have to assume that all but a tiny
handful of these folks mean the Bible in English, by the way.]

What am I to make of this statistical datum?It would be comforting, but probably wrong,
to suppose that this is just a consequence of the social dynamics of
poll-taking [a subject about which I have written before, with reference to a
classic essay by David Riesman.] People
understand that the answer one gives to a question may not really be a statement
of one’s beliefs, but may rather be an occasion for self-identification as a
certain sort of American.Thus, if
Gallup were to ask a cross-section of Americans whether Barack Obama has horns,
a non-negligible percentage would say yes, but that does not mean they would be
genuinely surprised if they were to meet him and find that he does not.They would understand that the question
really being asked was “Do you hate Obama?” and their response to that implied question would indeed be
accurate.

But I think there probably really are about one hundred
million Americans who think that the Bible [in English] is the Word of God and
should be taken literally, word for word.How can this possibly be?

I brood on things like this a lot when I am not actively
engaged in something more useful, and I think I have an answer.Look, these hundred million men and women are
almost certainly averagely intelligent, averagely competent people.They get through the day, they hold down
jobs, they drive, they know how to turn lights on and off, most of them are literate.And
nothing it says in the Bible interferes in any way with this quotidian
functionality.

But now let us suppose that Leviticus 5:17 said “Tweets can
be no longer than seventeen characters.”Whoa!That would call for some
serious textual interpretation, because these faithful Fundamentalists know
perfectly well that tweets can be 140 characters long, and save for some technologically
clued-in Amish, who tend to walk the walk as well as talking the talk, they are
not going to cut their tweets short at 17 characters just because the Bible
says so.The same descent into
exegetical interpretation would be required if Matthew 6:17 said “Le Bron James
is a lousy basketball player.”

But the great thing about the Bible is that it doesn’t say anything at all about the simple facts
that simple people know.Oh, it says
Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and lived there for three days until the fish
belched him up.But few if any of those
hundred million have actually seen a whale close up, and believing the Jonah
story in no way interferes with their daily rounds.

I mean, when I was a boy my father wrote a high school
Biology text which, among many other things, said that there are 48 chromosomes
in the human cell.I lived quite comfortably
for many years with that piece of misinformation until I found out that early
staining techniques had resulted in a miscount – there are actually only 46.

Of course, believing nutty things for religious reasons has
real world consequences – it leads these people to support politicians who pass
genuinely awful laws designed to impoverish people and blight their lives, so
it matters a good deal that one hundred million Americans are Inerrantists.But holding that belief does not make them
dysfunctional in any immediately manifest fashion.

The residential and social self-segregation of American life
results in my almost never meeting one of these Fundamentalists.Even though I live in North Carolina, which
is pretty benighted, I don’t get out of Chapel Hill much, and as I have often
observed, in Chapel Hill you can go for quite a while without hearing a
Southern accent.So I may be all
wrong.Maybe Gallup could do a poll.

6 comments:

Most people do ignore the bit about not wearing mixed fiber fabrics, or women being "unclean" and needing to be kept away during their periods, though. Or perhaps they think that's done away with by the "new law" that Jesus brings in, though few people have any real idea how that's supposed to work- which parts are in and which out.

I suspect that most people who give an affirmative answer to this question, 1) don't really know what it would mean for the Bible to be "literally true" and 2) don't really know most of what's in the Bible. They read bits and pieces, but not all and most not carefully.(This is in addition to your remarks, which I'd agree with.)

I too cannot believe that anybody who believes the bible is literally true has read the bible. Much is explicitly metaphorical. Think about the poetry is psalms. Or sayings about how our fathers have drunk sweet wine and our teeth rot. This is a metaphor for children being punished for the sins of their parents.

Have you ever watched one of those evangelical events held in a conference center? It is a sociological sight to behold. The audience is usually dolled up in its Sunday best and throughout, people sit with Bible, pens and highlighters. Everytime the speaker mentions a passage, the room murmers with the sounds of the faithful checking to see whether the passage is read correctly and whether the context is correct and whatever one does. It may not be that all evangelicals or fundamentalists read the Bible, but surely more than half have. That's what I've seen in any case. Now, if reading requires informed, sceptical and critical analysis, then maybe not. But, there is an important sense in which many of the evangelicals have read the book. Try searching YouTube for "evangelical services" and many include the weekly reading of some section of the Bible.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.